Problem: The paper mill in town is generating waste. Find a way to reuse this waste that would be environmentally-safe.
Solution: By using the paper mill waste as a packaging product the earth can be rid of Styrofoam which has proven to be harmful to the environment.
In order to do this lab I considered things that would make a packaging product successful. Styrofoam is commonly used for this purpose as it is lightweight, yet it poses a threat to our world. Styrofoam's chemical name is polystyrene, which is a petroleum based plastic. Polystyrene's primary ingredient is styrene. The EPA and the International Agency for Research on Cancer have established styrene as a possible human carcinogen. If that's not bad enough, Styrofoam is not biodegradable as it is resistant to photolysis, or the breaking down of materials by protons originating from a light source. It has also been noted for contaminating the air.The National Bureau of Standards Center for Fire Research noted 57 chemical by-products released during the creation of Styrofoam. These all seem like risky side effects of a product that can be replaced by none other than cellulose.
Wood pulp, or cellulose, is a prime component of the paper mill waste. Lately it can be found in almost everything, from makeup remover pads to ice cream and its uses seem endless. It is the most abundant organic polymer on earth, and it can be used to replace Styrofoam. The chemical formula is C6H10O5. TO find it's molar mass I multiply the amount of each element by its atomic mass and add it together like this: (6 x 12.01g)+(10 x 1.00g)+(5 x 15.99g)=162.01g/mol Styrofoam, on the other hand, has a chemical formula of C8H8 so I can find the molar mass as so: (8 x 12.01g)+(8 x 1.00g)=104.08g/mol So one mole of polystyrene is less than one mole of cellulose.
I decided characteristics of a good packaging product would be light-weight, hydrophilic (draws water away from box to keep it from deteriorating and away from the product that is being shipped), and most importantly will keep the product that is being sent from breaking. From there I designed a solubility test and an egg drop experiment to test if the paper mill waste could match up to polystyrene.
For the solubility test I used 200 mL of water with a measured amount of Styrofoam and paper mill waste.
Mass of Beaker
192.00g
Mass of Beaker
192.00g
Mass of Beaker+
Paper mill waste
248.70g
Mass of Styrofoam
.19g
In this test I could very easily see that polystyrene is hydrophobic (water fearing). It also showed that the Styrofoam was less dense than water as it floated on the surface. No amount of stirring aided the water in breaking down the packing peanuts. The popular chemistry saying "like dissolves like" tells us why this happens. Water is polar from the difference in electronegativity between the hydrogen and the oxygen. The highly electronegative oxygen atom attracts electrons or negative charge to it, making the region around the oxygen more negative than the areas around the two hydrogen atoms. Styrofoam is non-polar because it is composed of only carbon and hydrogen so the difference in electronegativity is fairly low. Cellulose will not dissolve in water either, this is important. No one wants to open a box to find a mushy catastrophe. To look at why cellulose is not soluble in water we must look at the structure.
In cellulose, each succesive glucose unit is rotated 180 degrees around the axis of the polymer backbone chain. Cellulose makes up most of a plant cell's wall. A plant uses glucose to make cellulose when it links many simple units of glucose together to form long chains. These long chains are called polysaccharides, or "many sugars', and it is because of these long molecules that cellulose is insoluble or does not dissolve easily in water. These long molecules also are formed into a criss-cross mesh that gives strength and shape to the cell wall. The cellulose will absorb water though as the OH ends of the cellulose chain allow for hydrogen bonding with water molecules.
(Paper mill waste in water) (Polystyrene in water)
This makes wood pulp (cellulose) excellent for packaging because it will absorb any water it comes in contact with but won't dissolve in it so the box and the product being shipped can remain dry and there won't be a dissolved mess.
Next, a partner and I performed an egg drop experiment.
It's easy to see the physics behind this, Newton's Laws of Motion is the basic idea illustrated in the egg drop experiment. The first is law of inertia, or an object at rest will stay at rest unless an external force acts on it or an object in motion will stay in motion unless an external force acts on it. The next is velocity which is really the relationship between external forces acting upon an object and the objects change in momentum. The force increases as the time required for the change decreases.
While this is all very interesting, it has nothing to do with chemistry.
Density, however, plays a key role in this experiment. The Styrofoam is less dense than water so it can cushion a fall but it isn't very shock absorbing. In our egg drop experiment the Styrofoam failed both times to protect the egg from a drop of 2.6 meters and a drop of 3.6 meters.
We used the same box for the drops as well as the same distances. The paper mill waste worked both times. This information backed up the idea that it would make a good packaging product. We then calculated the density of the paper mill waste by filling a beaker with some and weighing it, subtracting the original mass of the beaker. Then we filled the beaker with water and poured it into a graduated cylinder to find the volume. Then we could use the density formula:
(Egg after drop test in waste) (Egg after drop in polystyrene)
or Density equals mass divided by volume. The total mass of the paper mill waste in the beaker was 31.074 grams and the volume was 64.0 milliliters. However the volume need to be in liters for the equation to work properly.
64.0mL x 1 liter/1000mL=.064mL
D=31.074g/.064L
D=485.531g/L
Polystyrene is said to be about 1.05g/L
Clearly the paper mill waste is a great deal denser than the Styrofoam, making it excellent at protecting the product being shipped.
The down side to the waste is that it weighs much more than Styrofoam so there may be measures that can be taken to reduce the mass like separating the aluminum and calcium carbonate from the waste yet that only accounts for a small portion of the mass. Also wood pulp does not dissolve in water so it may pose a threat to environment, although much less than Styrofoam does. Yet the cost would stay low because I didn't add anything to the waste and there wouldn't be a long process in making it (and it wouldn't release all the air pollutants that the creation of polystyrene does). This would mean that it would not have a large impact financially yet the MSDS on the waste says that if inhaled, the waste could be potentially harmful. I would then use something along the lines of a plastic bag around the waste so that this would not happen. Otherwise, cellulose occurs extremely commonly in nature and I doubt it would be as bad for the environment as polystyrene is.
Citations
"How Styrofoam Is Bad for the Environment." LoveToKnow. N.p., n.d. Web. 10 June 2013.
"FiberSource: The Manufactured Fiber Industry." FiberSource: The Manufactured Fiber Industry. American Fiber Manufacturers Association, n.d. Web. 10 June 2013.
"Polystyrene and Foam Packaging." Polystyrene Products. Styro Tech Limited, n.d. Web. 10 June 2013.
Solution: By using the paper mill waste as a packaging product the earth can be rid of Styrofoam which has proven to be harmful to the environment.
In order to do this lab I considered things that would make a packaging product successful. Styrofoam is commonly used for this purpose as it is lightweight, yet it poses a threat to our world. Styrofoam's chemical name is polystyrene, which is a petroleum based plastic. Polystyrene's primary ingredient is styrene. The EPA and the International Agency for Research on Cancer have established styrene as a possible human carcinogen. If that's not bad enough, Styrofoam is not biodegradable as it is resistant to photolysis, or the breaking down of materials by protons originating from a light source. It has also been noted for contaminating the air.The National Bureau of Standards Center for Fire Research noted 57 chemical by-products released during the creation of Styrofoam. These all seem like risky side effects of a product that can be replaced by none other than cellulose.
Wood pulp, or cellulose, is a prime component of the paper mill waste. Lately it can be found in almost everything, from makeup remover pads to ice cream and its uses seem endless. It is the most abundant organic polymer on earth, and it can be used to replace Styrofoam. The chemical formula is C6H10O5. TO find it's molar mass I multiply the amount of each element by its atomic mass and add it together like this:
(6 x 12.01g)+(10 x 1.00g)+(5 x 15.99g)=162.01g/mol
Styrofoam, on the other hand, has a chemical formula of C8H8 so I can find the molar mass as so:
(8 x 12.01g)+(8 x 1.00g)=104.08g/mol
So one mole of polystyrene is less than one mole of cellulose.
I decided characteristics of a good packaging product would be light-weight, hydrophilic (draws water away from box to keep it from deteriorating and away from the product that is being shipped), and most importantly will keep the product that is being sent from breaking. From there I designed a solubility test and an egg drop experiment to test if the paper mill waste could match up to polystyrene.
For the solubility test I used 200 mL of water with a measured amount of Styrofoam and paper mill waste.
192.00g
192.00g
Paper mill waste
248.70g
.19g
In cellulose, each succesive glucose unit is rotated 180 degrees around the axis of the polymer backbone chain. Cellulose makes up most of a plant cell's wall. A plant uses glucose to make cellulose when it links many simple units of glucose together to form long chains. These long chains are called polysaccharides, or "many sugars', and it is because of these long molecules that cellulose is insoluble or does not dissolve easily in water. These long molecules also are formed into a criss-cross mesh that gives strength and shape to the cell wall. The cellulose will absorb water though as the OH ends of the cellulose chain allow for hydrogen bonding with water molecules.
(Paper mill waste in water) (Polystyrene in water)
This makes wood pulp (cellulose) excellent for packaging because it will absorb any water it comes in contact with but won't dissolve in it so the box and the product being shipped can remain dry and there won't be a dissolved mess.
Next, a partner and I performed an egg drop experiment.
It's easy to see the physics behind this, Newton's Laws of Motion is the basic idea illustrated in the egg drop experiment. The first is law of inertia, or an object at rest will stay at rest unless an external force acts on it or an object in motion will stay in motion unless an external force acts on it. The next is velocity which is really the relationship between external forces acting upon an object and the objects change in momentum. The force increases as the time required for the change decreases.
While this is all very interesting, it has nothing to do with chemistry.
Density, however, plays a key role in this experiment. The Styrofoam is less dense than water so it can cushion a fall but it isn't very shock absorbing. In our egg drop experiment the Styrofoam failed both times to protect the egg from a drop of 2.6 meters and a drop of 3.6 meters.
We used the same box for the drops as well as the same distances. The paper mill waste worked both times. This information backed up the idea that it would make a good packaging product. We then calculated the density of the paper mill waste by filling a beaker with some and weighing it, subtracting the original mass of the beaker. Then we filled the beaker with water and poured it into a graduated cylinder to find the volume. Then we could use the density formula:
(Egg after drop test in waste) (Egg after drop in polystyrene)
or Density equals mass divided by volume. The total mass of the paper mill waste in the beaker was 31.074 grams and the volume was 64.0 milliliters. However the volume need to be in liters for the equation to work properly.
64.0mL x 1 liter/1000mL=.064mL
D=31.074g/.064L
D=485.531g/L
Polystyrene is said to be about 1.05g/L
Clearly the paper mill waste is a great deal denser than the Styrofoam, making it excellent at protecting the product being shipped.
The down side to the waste is that it weighs much more than Styrofoam so there may be measures that can be taken to reduce the mass like separating the aluminum and calcium carbonate from the waste yet that only accounts for a small portion of the mass. Also wood pulp does not dissolve in water so it may pose a threat to environment, although much less than Styrofoam does. Yet the cost would stay low because I didn't add anything to the waste and there wouldn't be a long process in making it (and it wouldn't release all the air pollutants that the creation of polystyrene does). This would mean that it would not have a large impact financially yet the MSDS on the waste says that if inhaled, the waste could be potentially harmful. I would then use something along the lines of a plastic bag around the waste so that this would not happen. Otherwise, cellulose occurs extremely commonly in nature and I doubt it would be as bad for the environment as polystyrene is.
Citations
"How Styrofoam Is Bad for the Environment." LoveToKnow. N.p., n.d. Web. 10 June 2013.
"FiberSource: The Manufactured Fiber Industry." FiberSource: The Manufactured Fiber Industry. American Fiber Manufacturers Association, n.d. Web. 10 June 2013.
"Polystyrene and Foam Packaging." Polystyrene Products. Styro Tech Limited, n.d. Web. 10 June 2013.